A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS ORIGINAL
Mavis Gallant is a contemporary legend, a frequent contributor to "The New Yorker" for close to fifty years who has, in the words of "The New York Times," "radically reshaped the short story for decade after decade." Michael Ondaatje's new selection of Gallant's work gathers some of the most memorable of her stories set in Europe and Paris, where Gallant has long lived. Mysterious, funny, insightful, and heartbreaking, these are tales of expatriates and exiles, wise children and straying saints. Together they compose a secret history, at once intimate and panoramic, of modern times.

This generous collection of fifty-two stories selected from across her prolific career by the author, is preceded by a preface in which she discusses the sources of her art. With irony and an unfailing eye for the telling detail, Gallant weaves stories of spare complexity, often pushing the boundaries of the form in boldly unconventional directions. The settings in the COLLECTED STORIES range from Paris to Berlin to Switzerland, from the Riviera to the Cote d'Azur, and her characters are almost all exiles of one sort or another, as she herself was the most of her expatriate life. The wit and precision of her prose, combined with her expansive view of humanity, provide a rare and deep reading pleasure. With breathtaking control and compression, Gallant delivers a whole life, a whole world, in each story.

A New York Review Books Original
Mavis Gallant is renowned as one of the great short-story writers of our day. This new gathering of long-unavailable or previously uncollected work presents stories from 1951 to 1971 and shows Gallant's progression from precocious virtuosity, to accomplished artistry, to the expansive innovatory spirit that marks her finest work.
"Madeleine's Birthday," the first of Gallant's many stories to be published in The New Yorker, pairs off a disaffected teenager, abandoned by her social-climbing mother, with a complacent middle-aged suburban housewife, in a subtly poignant comedy of miscommunication that reveals both characters to be equally adrift. "The Cost of Living," the extraordinary title story, is about a company of strangers, shipwrecked over a chilly winter in a Parisian hotel and bound to one another by animosity as much as by unexpected love.
Set in Paris, New York, the Riviera, and Montreal and full of scrupulously observed characters ranging from freebooters and malingerers to runaway children and fashion models, Gallant's stories are at once satirical and lyrical, passionate and skeptical, perfectly calibrated and in constant motion, brilliantly capturing the fatal untidiness of life.

Mavis Gallant is the modern master of what Henry James called the international story, the fine-grained evocation of the quandaries of people who must make their way in the world without any place to call their own. The irreducible complexity of the very idea of home is especially at issue in the stories Gallant has written about Montreal, where she was born, although she has lived in Paris for more than half a century.
"Varieties of Exile," Russell Banks's extensive new selection from Gallant's work, demonstrates anew the remarkable reach of this writer's singular art. Among its contents are three previously uncollected stories, as well as the celebrated semi-autobiographical sequence about Linnet Muir--stories that are wise, funny, and full of insight into the perils and promise of growing up and breaking loose.